Nobody Told You What to Live For. That's the Actual Problem.

The most prosperous generation in human history is also the most lost. This isn't a coincidence.

Something strange is happening.

By every material measure, the people alive right now — particularly in wealthy countries, particularly the young — have more than any previous generation. More food, more safety, more options, more access to information, more tools for connection. The baseline of physical existence has never been higher.

And yet antidepressant prescriptions are at record highs and climbing. In the UK, the number of people on them jumped from 6.9 million to 8.9 million in a decade. In the US, nearly a third of young people report experiencing a mental health condition, and 40% of high school students describe persistent sadness and hopelessness. Globally, one in eight people has a diagnosable mental health disorder. Among people aged 15 to 29, suicide is the second leading cause of death.

These aren't numbers from a society in material crisis. These are numbers from the most comfortable societies that have ever existed.

Which means the problem isn't material. It never was.

What Religion Actually Did

Before you can understand what's happening now, you have to understand what religion was actually doing — not theologically, but functionally.

For most of human history, in most human societies, religion wasn't primarily a set of metaphysical claims about the afterlife. It was an operating system for meaning. It told you why you were here, what you were supposed to do with your time, how to evaluate your choices, what counted as a good life and what didn't, and what happened when things went wrong. It gave suffering a frame — if your child died, if your crops failed, if you were sick or poor or afraid — the suffering had a context. It meant something. You could hold it.

Christianity in the West said: you were created intentionally, by a being who cares about you, in a universe organized around moral purpose. Your suffering is not random. Your life is not meaningless. There is a direction to things, and you are part of it.

You might not have believed every word of it. But you lived inside a culture that organized itself around that story, and the story gave your days a structure that was larger than your individual preferences.

What Happened When It Collapsed

Nietzsche saw what was coming and tried to warn everyone.

His famous line — God is dead, and we have killed him — is almost always misquoted as a triumphant atheist declaration. It wasn't. It was a horror story.

He was describing what happens when a civilization removes the foundation that has organized its values, its morality, its sense of purpose — without replacing it with anything of equivalent weight. The line that matters isn't "God is dead." It's the question that follows: how shall we comfort ourselves?

He saw the Enlightenment coming, with its championing of reason and science and individual autonomy, and he thought: this is going to work. And then he saw what would come after — that reason alone, science alone, individual autonomy alone, cannot answer the question of why any of it matters. You can use reason to solve problems. You cannot use reason to tell you which problems are worth solving, or what kind of life is worth living, or why you should get out of bed tomorrow when nothing is forcing you to.

He called what would follow the nihilistic age — an era in which the old values had collapsed and nothing had replaced them, leaving people in a void where nothing seemed to genuinely matter.

He thought it would take generations to fully arrive.

He was right. It's here now.

The Substitutes That Didn't Work

The gap didn't go unfilled. It never does.

After the religious foundations eroded, ideology stepped in. Communism, fascism, nationalism — each offered a story about who you were, what you were part of, what was worth fighting for, what the future looked like if you committed yourself to the cause. They were, in structure, almost exactly what religion had been: a framework that told you what mattered, who your people were, what was worth sacrificing for.

The catastrophes of the twentieth century — two world wars, the Holocaust, the Gulag — destroyed confidence in those frameworks. By the time the dust settled, large-scale political ideology had been, for most people in the developed world, discredited as a source of ultimate meaning.

Then consumerism stepped in. This one was subtler. It didn't announce itself as a meaning system. It just quietly organized everything around the premise that the good life was the one with more — more money, better apartment, better car, better brand, better status signals. And for a while, this worked, because there were real next steps. Study hard, get the good job, save money, buy the apartment. The ladder was visible and the rungs were achievable.

The problem is that the ladder has broken for a generation that was promised it would hold. In Korea, in the US, across most of the wealthy world, the transaction that was supposed to work — effort in, stability out — has stopped functioning the way it did. Young people are doing what they were told, and the promised life isn't materializing. The next rung doesn't exist. Or it's so far away it might as well not.

When the ladder breaks, you find out that the ladder wasn't the point. The point was always the direction — the sense that there was a next thing, a reason to keep moving. Take that away and what remains is the void that Nietzsche warned about.

The Two Responses

Nietzsche anticipated how people would respond to the nihilistic age, and he divided the responses into two types.

The first he called passive nihilism. This is the person who registers that nothing seems to have inherent meaning, and responds by lying down. Not dramatically — just quietly. Scrolling instead of building. Consuming instead of creating. Finding small pleasures that feel like relief but compound into a life that, from the inside, feels like nothing is really happening. He called the people who live this way "last men" — comfortable, safe, and profoundly empty.

The second response he called active nihilism — and eventually, at its highest expression, the overman. This is the person who looks at the void and decides to create their own values. Not to pretend the old certainties are back. Not to adopt someone else's framework wholesale. But to actually decide, from the ground up, what matters to you — and then build your life around that, regardless of whether anyone around you validates the choice.

He knew most people wouldn't become overmen. He was describing a direction, not an achievement. The relevant question isn't whether you can fully realize that ideal. It's whether you're moving toward it or away from it.

What "Your Own Next" Actually Means

The practical version of this is simpler than it sounds.

Most people who feel lost aren't lost because nothing exists that could matter to them. They're lost because they've been measuring their life against someone else's definition of what's supposed to matter — the salary number, the apartment, the relationship status, the social media performance — and finding themselves either failing to reach it or reaching it and feeling nothing.

The alternative isn't to have no standards. It's to have your own.

This requires something most people find surprisingly difficult: sitting with the question long enough to answer it honestly. Not what does success look like according to my parents, my peers, the culture I was raised in, the algorithm that knows my browsing history. What actually matters to me when I strip all of that away?

The people who seem genuinely alive — who have energy and direction even in difficult circumstances — almost always have a private answer to that question that they've built their days around. It doesn't have to be grand. It doesn't have to be Instagram-worthy. It just has to be real. A pursuit that generates its own next step. Something that creates the feeling of direction.

That's what religion gave people for thousands of years. That's what ideology gave people when religion failed. That's what consumerism tried to give people when ideology failed.

All of those external sources have broken down for the current generation. Which leaves only one place left to look.

The Difficult Thing About This Moment

The uncomfortable truth is that the current moment requires something from people that previous eras didn't demand in the same way.

Previous generations could outsource their sense of meaning. The church told you what mattered. The party told you what mattered. The social contract of the postwar economy told you what mattered. You didn't have to generate it yourself — you just had to participate in the system.

That option is less available now. The systems have failed. The frameworks have fractured. The ladders have broken.

Which means the generation alive right now is being asked — without being told this is what's being asked — to do something genuinely hard: to construct a sense of purpose in the absence of the external scaffolding that previous generations could lean on.

This is why Nietzsche's question still echoes. Not how do we prove God exists or doesn't exist. But: how shall we comfort ourselves? How shall we live? What shall we organize ourselves around now that the old organizing principles have collapsed?

There's no inherited answer anymore. There might never be one again.

Which means the answer, if it exists, has to be built — deliberately, personally, by each person who wants one.

The good news is that this was always the more honest version of the task. The bad news is that nobody told you it was yours to do.

Now you know.

— The Andes